TROOPERS
loreeventssecurityhacking
Stands for: TROOPERS - ERNW's Heidelberg conference, Europe's practitioners' favorite
ERNW's Heidelberg conference - the one experienced European practitioners name when they can only pick one: trainings, three tracks, and roundtables where speakers and attendees argue as equals.
Running since 2008 at Heidelberg's Print Media Academy under the motto of making the world a safer place, TROOPERS built its reputation on density rather than scale: two days of high-end trainings, two of talks (the Active Directory and Entra ID track has become a signature that gathers Europe's identity-security researchers like nowhere else), and a closing day of roundtables. The culture shows in the details - electronic badges with a soldering corner to modify them, the IPv6 Security Summit heritage, a town small enough that the conference takes over its evenings. Modest in size, outsized in the respect it commands.
TROOPERS built its reputation on density rather than scale, running since 2008 in Heidelberg with two days of high-end training before two days of talks, under a motto about making the world a safer place that the programme takes literally.
Its distinguishing characteristic is the subject matter. Where many conferences chase whatever is newly fashionable, TROOPERS has consistently platformed research into the unglamorous infrastructure everything else depends on: telecommunications signalling, IPv6, industrial control, enterprise directory internals. That research rarely trends and matters enormously, because the systems involved are difficult to test, expensive to replace, and quietly load-bearing for everything above them.
The format follows from that focus. Small enough that speakers stay for the whole event rather than flying in for a slot, technical enough that the audience can challenge the work, and repeated annually with the same community, which is how a venue develops the shared standards that make deep work possible. It is a good illustration that a conference's value comes from who returns rather than from how many attend once.
Also known as: troopers, ernw